James A. Michener · 1983 · overland

James Michener's 1983 novel, eight centuries of one country told through three families - peasants, minor gentry and magnates - on the same stretch of land near the Vistula. Tatars, the relief of Vienna, partition, the risings, the German occupation and the communist years all pass over the village, and the families keep having to decide what Poland is.

1. 1
   Krakow

   The old royal capital holds the country's law, learning and coronations - and the peasant Bukowskis and the magnate Lubonskis are bound together by land they see very differently, for eight hundred years.

2. 2
   Vienna

   In 1683 the Polish king rides south with his hussars to break the Ottoman siege of Vienna, the last great service Poland does Christendom before Europe repays it with partition - and the village sends its men to it.

3. 3
   Warsaw

   Warsaw carries the modern centuries - the partitions that erase the country from the map for over a century, the ghetto, the 1944 rising and the rubble - with the same families still on the same fields after.